Dragon hatchlings cake

So, a little diversion from costuming...

 My daughter, Elizabeth, loves dragons. Her "signature" craft is to make dragon hatchlings from Fimo clay to give to her friends as friendship tokens. For her birthday about a month ago, when we discussed what type of cake she wanted, she wasn't interested in a simple store-bought ice cream cake like her twin brother. No, she wanted dragon eggs.

We had started to come up with a plan when we heard about some upcoming Dragon Cake competitions at Coronation and Crown events. So, while we were working on the cakes for her birthday, we were also testing out techniques for a dragon cake competition.

I found a cake pan that is intended for making doll cakes using those half-barbie-dolls that you stick into the top of them. But, each shape was half of an egg, so we decided it would work out pretty well.
If I had seen this pan, I probably would have tried this instead. I think these would have ended up a more reasonable size. The others were pretty big.

For her birthday, Elizabeth wanted two chocolate cakes and two yellow cakes for her friends, based on which flavor they preferred. We used cake mix for these.

We've used fondant in the past for a few of their recent birthday cakes, and had always gone with pre-made fondant (we tried the Wilton brand, which was not great, and had moved on to the Satin Ice brand, which was better).  However, Elizabeth decided she wanted to try her hand at making fondant, so we found a recipe for marshmallow fondant.  It worked out pretty well, and was tastier and softer than the store-bought stuff.  We also made buttercream frosting from scratch (chocolate for the chocolate cakes, white chocolate for the yellow cakes).  We tested out draping the eggs in fondant versus dipping them in candy coating.  We also tried Wilton's Edible Decorating Dough, which I thought worked out pretty well. We also used some Wilton Gum Paste for a few of the items that needed to dry quite hard (like the dragon wings and a few skeleton/support pieces).

My sample egg, using dipped candy coating and decorating dough
Elizabeth's blue egg with green dragons, using fondant for the egg covering and the dragon
Elizabeth's purple egg with blue dragons, using fondant for the egg covering and the dragon.

Then it came time to make the dragon cake as an entry for the competition at Spring Crown. Since there was a youth category, Elizabeth wanted to enter that herself. So, although we had worked on the testing and birthday phase together, she did pretty much the whole competition entry herself. I wasn't even in the kitchen for the vast majority of it. She made the cakes from scratch, as well as the fondant and buttercream frosting. 

She decided that she didn't want to go with the edible decorating dough, since it didn't taste as good as the fondant. She did struggle with getting the dragon to hold its shape using the softer marshmallow fondant. She had originally planned on making a nearly full dragon to pop out of the top egg, but in the end she had to scale that back somewhat. I did need to help her a bit with draping the fondant onto the eggs, since it required more than two hands to drape, support, ease and trim the fondant. She used Wilton Pearl Dust mixed with lemon extract to paint the Midrealm Pale onto the eggs. I loved her last-minute idea to add a crown to the dragon that is at the top of the heap.

The final cake "Hatching the New Dragon Prince of the Middle Kingdom"

She won the Youth category of the competition at Crown Tournament. I wasn't able to stay, so I don't know how many other cakes she competed against. But I think she did an awesome job!

French Hood Instructions

I have written up instructions for creating my version of the French hood, as well as created a pattern that is available on my website. Hopefully some people will try it out and give me some feedback!

www.cardinal-creations.com/philippa/classes.htm

French hood article

The main section of my French hood article, based on my A&S faire entry, is up on my website. I've got a few modifications to make - such as I got a few more good sources for information on period metalworking techniques this weekend. And I'll probably try to get a scale version of the pattern up in case anyone else wants to try it out. But, other than that, it's all up for people to take a look at. The article is here: www.cardinal-creations.com/Philippa/TudorHoodProject.htm

Midlands A&S Faire

So, I clearly haven't done a pentathlon for this year. But I will! I truly plan to enter a pentathlon in NEXT year's A&S Faire! But, in the meantime, I created a great entry for this year's faire - a new French hood. Today was the Midlands A&S Faire, and I received a high first place for my entry. It's a great feeling when you're so happy and confident with your entry that you don't even get particularly flustered when you realize you've forgotten your documentation, and have to drive halfway home to meet up with your husband who is driving your documentation towards you! I also got to judge a couple of great projects, and saw several other really cool things. It was a very nice day.



So, I'll post shortly with the details of my project, and I'll try to get it up on my website for anyone who wants to try out my pattern. And I have already made a plan for most of the items for my pentathlon, so I'll get to work on blogging those projects too!

Beginning to hatch a plan

Some ideas have been percolating around my brain in terms of the projects I'd like to do for my Pentathlon entries. I've had an opportunity to discuss this with a couple people whose opinion I value. Sarafina Sinclair suggested that I work on creating a "persona" pentathlon, which means rather than scatter-shot picking various things from different divisions, I should choose things that have a cohesive relationship to a specific person in a specific time and place (presumably my persona). Although I originally tended to do primarily Elizabethan English clothing (with the occasional Italian or Burgundian thrown in), I recently have honed in on the Tudor time frame as my primary area of interest. So, my entries will all have to do with an English woman in the first half of the 16th century. Then, I was discussing this with Ercc Glaison, and he suggested that I look for a pair of books that he had seen at a used book store about Tudor architecture. The idea started to form that I should work on entries that revolve around upper-middle class Tudor home life. I could research Tudor buildings, or make furniture, or embroider an item that would have been used, or make a stained glass decoration, or make a child's toy. So, now I'm putting holds on a variety of books from area libraries about life in Tudor England. Tudor buildings, specifically the half-timbered style, have always fascinated me. When I lived in England, and later when I visited as an adult, I loved going to cities and towns with the old Tudor style shops with the upper stories leveraging over the street until they nearly met in the middle. The book that Ercc mentioned has detailed drawings and photographs of many Tudor buildings. Since the book is nearly 100 years old, some of these buildings may no longer the standing, though others may be significantly restored. For many years, I have wanted a reason to build a miniature Tudor building. After I made a dollhouse for my daughter's 4th birthday, I wanted to make another Tudor style one for myself. I'd love to do so now as a way to research the Tudor life of the time. The problem is how that could relate to an A&S entry. There's not really a place for a scale model alone. I used a scale model of my pavilion to support an A&S entry, but the item really being judged was the full-scale pavilion. I know that dolls were played with by girls of the Tudor era, but I don't know that doll houses were made. I could make it as part of a research project and use it in support of a research paper. But I'm not sure that it's worth the extra effort beyond the research itself. It would make a great A&S display at some point. So, these ideas as still in a rather nebulous phase, but I'm getting excited about how I can bring a variety of disparate projects together to make a meaningful whole. Philippa

This is why I haven't been posting about A&S stuff...

So, I started this blog figuring it would help me be more consistent at working on my A&S projects and writing about them.  Then life got in the way.  My husband and I tend to take on a sizable renovation project each spring/summer, and this year is no different.  We decided to vastly modify the huge deck on the back of our house, and replace it with a smaller deck and a nice patio.  While we plan to hire someone to do the patio portion, I've been doing the rest myself, with a small amount of help from the kids and occasionally Mark on weekends.  

Here's the before picture:


Here's the progress I made just on the first day:


And here's the current progress:


And then, yesterday morning we awoke to water in our basement. The entire wall-to-wall carpet was floating on a layer of water, and in many places it was sitting an inch deep on top as well. The sump pumps just couldn't keep up with the volume of water that came down in a short period of time. We pulled out everything in the basement (including furniture, cabinets that we had installed, sewing room, and workshop) and filled our garage and piled up many other areas of our house. We had a flood restoration company come out and pull up the carpet, remove the pad, cut out the damaged drywall and insulation, and they're attempting to dry out the carpet in an attempt to save it. It'll be weeks if not months before we get everything back the way it was. And we now have no workshop, while we're in the middle of a big construction project (the deck), and I have no sewing room, when we're a month away from Pennsic. So, it'll be a while before I have the time to do anything useful on my A&S projects. Maybe I'll find time to write about what I'm planning, but it will be pretty sparse for a while.

This is the current state of my sewing room. :-(

Fingerloop Braiding Class

So this weekend at Border Skirmish, I gave a class on beginning fingerloop braiding.  Until now, all of the classes that I've given have been more lecture-style - that is, I stand up and give information about children's garb, or pavilion making, or whatever, using a Power Point presentation or handouts for pictures.  But for Border Skirmish, I decided that something a little more hands-on would be good.  I really enjoyed learning fingerloop braiding at Pennsic last year, and figured it'd be something that people would be be curious about and be interested in learning.  So, I put together a handout and pulled together a class.

Considering that the event had lots of outdoors stuff going on, and it was absolutely beautiful outside, there were few people coming in for classes and shopping.  So I was pretty pleased by the fact that I got three people at my class, a couple more asking for my handouts but who couldn't stay, and several more who I taught afterwards.  One of the women said she had been taught before, but never really quite "got it".  But after my class, she felt really comfortable with it.  I think it helped that I did a couple things that I had noticed as being kindof vague in the class that I took.  I started them off with pre-cut and pre-tied loops, so that we didn't have to spend ten minutes with everyone cutting, folding and tying their bowes.  Then, I had them take a single bowe and pass it from hand to hand, learning the difference between unreversed and reversed.  Then, we started with a 3-loop braid, rather than one of the more complex ones.  The class that I took at Pennsic jumped right in with an 8-loop spiral braid, which is much more complicated.  The 3-loop let the students feel comfortable with passing from one hand to another, through another loop, and get the feel of pulling the string through reversed.  Then, it was an easy jump to a 5-loop purse-string braid, and they could see themselves moving onto more complex ones by reading the directions.

So, I will definitely plan on giving this class again.  I'm going to convert it to HTML and put it up on my website.  Hopefully others will find it helpful, too.